Last week, on my second day as a citizen of Rome, I saw a local
in an SUV back into a busy avenue. Steering with one hand and
holding his cell-phone with the other, he glanced over his
shoulder, mildly curious to see whether anyone might be headed his
way.
A few minutes later on the same street, the driver behind me
grew frustrated because I was exceeding the speed limit by only 20
miles per hour. Naturally he took action. It didn’t matter that we
were already in the left-hand lane, and that we could see traffic
coming from the opposite direction. He swerved onto the wrong side
of the street and cut back in front of me just in time. I’m sure I
was the only one who noticed.
There are plenty of places with worse traffic than Rome: Tehran,
Manila, Bogotá, and lots of other Third World cities. But
you might have thought that the capital of the world’s
eighth-largest economy would run a little more smoothly than
this.
The only thing worse than the driving in Rome is the parking,
though the two are often hard to tell apart. The basic distinction
is that stalled traffic sits in the middle of the street, whereas
parked cars sit along the edges, in double or even triple rows.
Every possible space is taken, right up to the corner, so that
you might have to go many yards past the theoretical crosswalk to
find enough space between two bumpers for you to wedge through. If
you happen be to pushing a stroller, you might have to go half way
up the block.
For years, Romans have been talking about reducing the number of
cars and improving public transportation. There is a subway, but
its two lines miss many important places, such as the Vatican. Most
here blame this on the archeological richness of the ground, which
makes digging anywhere a slow and delicate process. But it’s hard
to believe that a city so disorganized in every other way would be
efficient in this one if it simply weren’t for all those catacombs
and temple foundations.
One result of the congestion is that no one leaves his
neighborhood unless he has to, which means that the city remains a
collection of urban villages. This can be charming, if you don’t
have to commute far to work.
Another result of the traffic problem is pollution. Italy
outlawed leaded-gas vehicles only last year, and like much of the
rest of Europe, is far behind the U.S. when it comes to emissions
controls. Walking along a major thoroughfare in any Italian city is
unpleasant, and in Rome it’s lung-scorching. I feel guilty for
exposing my one-year-old son’s respiratory system to this. Luckily,
our apartment building is practically surrounded by a large and
leafy park. It could be my imagination, but all those trees seem to
filter out a good bit of the soot.
There is one part of Rome where the traffic is slow and orderly,
the noise level low, and the air relatively clean. That’s the
Vatican, which is officially not part of Italy but its own
sovereign territory. The areas off-limits to tourists seem
preternaturally quiet compared to the hub-bub on the other side of
the gate.
After a while, the quiet gets spooky. The sense of being watched
— if not by the eye of God, then by the Swiss Guards — becomes
oppressive. I find myself longing for Roman chaos. For all the
indignities it inflicts, it’s also generous. The same driver who
cuts you off without warning is unlikely to make a fuss if you do
the same to him. That’s not the stuff of sainthood, maybe, but it
is a kind of civic virtue.
